TV Saturday: Mixology an intoxicating take on friendship and romance

Show is a real-time, Altmanesque comedy about singles in a bar

Don’t look too closely or think about it too hard, but Mixology — a clever on-the-bubble sitcom about suburban singles connecting, linking in and hooking up at a bar — is bending the rules of traditional TV comedy.

Or trying to, anyway.

The U.S. broadcast networks unveil their fall schedules starting Monday, and the betting is that Mixology is a long-shot at best for a second season. CTV has consigned Mixology to Saturday nights, which, given its premise — lonely singles trying to find their soulmates while hanging out one night with friends over drinks — is apt. Saturday night is all right for partying, and Mixology has a fresh, unique approach to TV storytelling.

The Altmanesque, real-time comedy focuses on a different couple each week. There are a dozen characters in all, including Kacey, played by Montreal’s Vanessa Lengies. Each episode revolves around a particular pairing — Tom (Blake Lee) and Maya (Ginger Gonzaga) in the opener, Liv (Kate Simses) and Ron (Adam Campbell) in the second episode, and so on.

Ginger Gonzaga, left, and Vanessa Lengies in Mixology

By the sixth episode, the original pairings were reaching out to other members of their group. In this week’s outing, Maya, first seen in the opener, is chatting up Bruce (Andrew Santino), who wasn’t fully introduced until the third episode.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really. Mixology was made for binge viewing, because it’s in real time — the events take place over one night in a bar — and because, seen together, the episodes have a depth and resonance that’s both revealing and disarming. Ten episodes have aired; just three remain.

Do have a look, if you get the chance. There’s more creativity, wit and daring in a single episode of Mixology than an entire season of Two and a Half Men. Sadly, only one of the them is likely to be back for another season.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile